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Monday, June 2, 2008

Green Bananas

There was this great old guy that was in our church choir this past year. His name is Bill and he's 85 years old. Despite his age Bill is remarkably spry and has an extremely good tenor voice. His only handicap is that he suffers from hearing loss and subsequently wears hearing aides. You might justifiably ask how this works with singing? Music - singing - tuning - all requires listening which requires hearing....I can see how that question would arise. Fortunately his hearing loss does not seem to be bad enough to cause Bill major problems.One challenge that I have regularly observed is Bill fumbling through his music not knowing where we are in a song or even which song we are on. This is, in part. because our choir director is very soft spoken and hard to hear even for those of us with good ears. Bill will often belt out a solo note that is not meant to be a solo note because he is not in the same place as the rest of us. Bill is good natured about it and laughs. A choir neighbour is often trying to ensure that he knows what's going on but occasionally fails and then we are blessed with Bill's solo notes. Hey, if an 85 year old is capable enough to be in a choir, what are a few mistakes?Last night as we were leaving church we encountered Bill and he asked if we planned to join choir again the fall. We said that we were and asked if he was.Bill chuckled and said,"At my age, I don't even buy green bananas!"